ABRADIG

Brazilian Association of Digital Radio

The Brazilian Association of Digital Radio was founded in June of 2016 with the aim of promoting the implementation of Digital Radio in Brazil.

ABRADIG's goal is to promote and advocate for the digitization of the radio broadcast and the standardization of the Brazilian Digital Radio System, and to support development of Digital Radio in Brazil and Latin American region with focus on social and technological aspects.

ABRADIG's mission is to promote, support and spread adoption of Digital Radio technologies that enable and foster communication for the people, specifically those who are living in places with limitedor no connectivity at all. ABRADIG serves as a platform to promote radio digitization and bring
together the efforts on social, economic, geopolitical and technical aspects of the use of digital radio towards the democratization of the radio waves in Brazil and Latin American region. As concrete objectives ABRADIG pushes for the adoption of the Digital Radio Mondiale standard as reference
model of the Brazilian Digital Radio System, and promotes a telecommunication regulation change concerning the use of the spectrum, which would allow non-commercial use of a fraction of all bands in the radio waves without the need of an specific license, an approach we call Free Spectrum (Port.
"Espectro Livre").

ABRADIG has existed, as an informal advocacy group since 2010 with the focus of supporting the adoption of the Digital Radio Mondiale standard as reference model of the Brazilian Digital Radio System, and to support a telecommunication regulation change which make it easy and less expensive
for communities located in isolated and underserved forest-area regions of Brazil to access the radio spectrum for their own communication.

Digital Radio

Digital radio, as well as analog radio, is a terrestrial broadcasting system that uses the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit audio and data. In the case of analog radio, the audio signal is modulated in FM or AM, analog modulations. In digital, the audio is first digitized and its binary sequence is modulated by some digital coding pattern to be transmitted by air in a very similar way to an analog radio, involving traditional elements such as tower and antennas. In digital radio, however, there is no wheezing or noise, and in addition to audio other information can be transmitted, such as images, texts and interactive multimedia applications. Digital radio can operate in all broadcasting bands, including the Medium Wave, Tropical Wave, Shortwave and VHF bands, both in simulcast mode (analog and digital broadcast together) and in pure digital mode.

Activities

ABRADIG's vision:

The focus of our work is to develop and implement radio solutions in Brazil that support communities with little or no access to communication infrastructure. We believe that broadcasting and point-to-point/multi-point networks should complement each other considering the
different distribution models.

Today ABRADIG is a multidisciplinary group of sociologists, anthropologists, journalists, amateur radio operators, electrical engineers and computer scientists. Members of ABRADIG have a long standing record of experience in:

1) working with Digital Radio broadcasting and terrestrial Digital TV;

2) working on and with community networks in Brazil:
- Terra do Meio communities: There are many traditional and indigenous living in a vast region of Terra do Meio Ecological Station, inside the Amazon Forest, in Pará state. In partnership with Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) NGO, ABRADIG is supporting the adoption of digital communication in HF,
which will be used primarily to support the economical activities inside the forest, like production of oil and nuts;
- Fonias Juruá: Network of 8 HF radios, built by members of ABRADIG, in the RESEX do Altó Juruá (Extrative Reserve of Upper Juruá River), in Acre state, inside Amazon forest. First bi-directional digital transmission trials in 2016. Received a Ministry of Culture grant (2013) and was
awarded with the FRIDA grant (2016);

- Kalunga Communities: Located in Goiás State, the Kalunga quilombola communities live in the mountains of Chapada dos Veadeiros, and have an incomplete / not working WiFi network which was set by volunteers. As their location is relatively close to Brasília (around 350km), it's a strategic
place to test short range bi-directional HF developments, and provide an alternative to terrestrial line-of-sight wireless systems to Kalunga people;

- Irehi Project: This is a project run by Operação Amazônia Nativa (OPAN) NGO, in which ABRADIG members collaborated in the installation of a HF network to the Manoki indigenous population living in the north of Mato Grosso state.

3) collaborating with various actors and organizations on a regional and a national level in Brazil:

- Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication (MCTIC) and National Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL), with which ABRADIG maintains continuous dialog in order to support the standardization of the Brazilian Digital Radio System and to promote regulatory changes to facilitate the implementation of telecommunication networks in an autonomous way, thought participation in meetings and public consultations;
- Brazilian public broadcaster (Empresa Brasil de Comunicações - EBC): The longstanding partnership of EBC and ABRADIG is very important to the project as the access to the HF transmission facility of EBC, the most powerful of its type in the southern hemisphere, provides HF
broadcasting coverage to the whole world. Also, EBC and ABRADIG are jointly developing interactive hypermedia applications to be broadcast over the radio;
- University of Brasília, ABRADIG is partner of Prof. Plínio Ricardo Ganime Alves, head of the antennas laboratory, and coordinator of a project which will buy, by the end of February 2019, a 2.5kW HF transmitter, which we'll be able to use in the context of this project, to broadcast data to
Amazon forest region. Also colaborating with Prof. Paulo Tavares, in the Irehi Project, together with Prof. Paulo Tavares (from University of Brasília) and OPAN NGO, in the Manoki indigenous communities living in the north of Mato Grosso state;

Associates

ABRADIG is formed by a team of researchers and engineers with extensive knowledge of digital radio and its economic and social implications.